Help us finish this project through a donation to our Mind Lab Fund.

A New Door to Retreat

There is a moment when a building becomes something much greater than the sum of its materials. For nearly two years, that process has been slowly unfolding at our hermitage, where the CCR team has been incrementally bringing new potential to a small cabin previously unoccupied due to disrepair: Tidro Cave. What was once a deteriorating structure will soon open a new chapter in how we offer retreat here at the Center for Contemplative Research. We are delighted to share an update on its progress and the people who are bringing it to life.

The inspiration behind Tidro Cave is simple but consequential. For many, the prospect of undertaking long-term retreat remains distant or can be difficult to imagine. Such a commitment can feel daunting when weighed against the responsibilities of an engaged life, including family, work, and service, let alone a daily meditation practice. 

Cultivating a deepening practice takes time, and requires the momentum of inspiration—which can be stoked through shorter retreats, especially in spiritual community. The opportunity to practice in a dedicated retreat environment with conducive conditions and support is rare. But that opportunity to step away from familiar routines and discover the transformative possibilities of contemplative practice should not feel so far out of reach. The CCR is delighted to soon be able to offer Tidro Cave for short-term retreat to provide just such an opportunity to our community. 

Once completed—hopefully by the end of 2026—the cabin will become available for shorter retreats, allowing people to stay in the remarkable environment of Miyo Samten Ling Hermitage in Crestone, CO and engage in dedicated practice without a longer-term commitment. This taste of deep retreat in the profound stillness, silence, natural beauty of our hermitage—imbued with the history of decades of contemplative life—is sure to plant profound seeds for your individual practice. And it is in keeping with our mission to help others cultivate and experience the fruits of contemplative practice in a variety of ways. Expanding access to retreat is a natural extension of that commitment.

The People Behind the Project

Bringing this vision to life has been a labor of dedication for builder Laura Bartels, CCR Property Manager Aaron Taylor, and other contributors whose professional expertise and spiritual commitments have found a remarkable convergence in this project.

Laura brings more than two decades of experience in sustainable construction, specializing in high-performance natural building technologies. Her path into the field began in childhood, working alongside her father as their family renovated a hand-built stone house in New England. Years later, an interest in environmental education and a desire to build a home in harmony with its surroundings led her to explore straw-bale construction. What followed was an unexpected career spanning design, construction (hands-on “tool-belt time,” as she calls it), consulting for residential, commercial, and industrial projects nationally and teaching at universities. Her work even took her to Washington, D.C., where she presented a Congressional briefing on straw-bale construction and subsequently contributed to sustainable housing initiatives on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

Yet when Laura speaks about Tidro Cave, it’s more personal. Walking the hermitage grounds with Aaron in 2024, and learning of the CCR’s ambitions to  offer short-term retreat by bringing new life to a long-abandoned structure, she recognized the opportunity to put decades of experience toward something she considered deeply meaningful: the possibility of even just one more person having the precious opportunity to undertake retreat there. As she reflects on her involvement, Laura describes it as an unexpected weaving of professional experience, service to her teacher, and devotion to the Dharma.

For Aaron, the project has also become an expression of that shared commitment. In fact, some of the initial design ideas arose while he was on retreat at the hermitage. As he jokingly observes, this might serve as a cautionary tale about remembering to focus on meditation during retreat! 

Their collaboration has been characterized by the kind of patience and humility that the project itself hopes to cultivate. Laura describes working alongside Aaron as “dipping into a peaceful calm pool,” and she appreciates his kindness, consistency, and the ease with which they approach even the most challenging design questions. It is a fitting reflection of the spirit behind the work.

Building With the Future in Mind

Despite its modest footprint of fewer than 300 square feet, Tidro Cave has presented some interesting design challenges. The original layout made the cabin feel even smaller than it was, so the team has been reimagining the interior to maximize space while creating an environment that is comfortable, functional, and conducive to retreat.

Sustainability has guided the team’s decisions throughout. Rather than demolishing and rebuilding, the renovation preserves the original structural elements, while carefully salvaging the beautiful Douglas fir flooring and pine boards from the walls and ceiling for reuse. Richie Marino, a local builder who has worked extensively on the Tidro Cave project, repurposed the reclaimed rough-cut lumber into trim for windows and baseboards, and notes the rarity of such Douglas fir wood these days. He also appreciates the generosity of local contractors in providing affordable rates for the CCR—a testament to the unique local community here and its support for the robust spiritual life Crestone hosts. The finished cabin will also incorporate thoughtful insulation, passive solar design, and an airtight building envelope to improve energy efficiency and ensure lasting comfort.

Help Us Bring Tidro Cave Across the Finish Line

Work on Tidro Cave has also required navigating an increasingly difficult economic environment. Inflation and international tariffs have complicated materials procurement and introduced additional cost pressures. Nevertheless, Laura, Aaron, and the rest of the team have continued to approach these challenges with resourcefulness and a shared commitment to building something that will serve retreatants for decades.

We are now working toward an anticipated opening in January 2027 as the project approaches its next phase. With drywall installation scheduled to begin, the team is preparing to complete the remaining exterior work before colder weather sets in and then turn their attention indoors. Painting, cabinetry, flooring, trim and baseboards, along with the final electrical and plumbing work, will bring the cabin closer to welcoming its first retreatants.

Aaron looks forward to the day when retreatants emerge from Tidro Cave with a deeper appreciation of the genuine happiness and well-being that Dharma practice can cultivate. His most profound hope is that they discover something that extends well beyond their time at the hermitage such that everyday life need not stand in the way of a spiritual journey. Instead, it can become the very path. A building can provide shelter, but it is the possibilities within it that give it meaning. We look forward to the many journeys that will begin at Tidro Cave, and we are grateful to everyone that is helping make them possible.

To help us complete the project, we welcome donations to our Mind Lab Fund, which supports renovation and building projects at the CCR. Your contribution will enable us meet the remaining construction costs and bring this important space into service. We hope you will consider supporting this undertaking! Every contribution brings us closer to opening the doors of Tidro Cave and extending the precious opportunity for retreat to those who might otherwise never have taken that first step.

For much of my professional life, I thought I was trying to understand and help other people using the tools of science and medicine. Beneath that effort, however, was a subconscious journey toward understanding myself.

I was raised in Ethiopia between two different accounts of human suffering and flourishing. My father had come of age amid the upheavals of the 1960s, witnessing countless communist revolutions and the struggle for independence across the African continent. Determined to teach me about civil strife in his world, he made sure I understood the allure of authoritarian leaders, the roots of inhumanity, and how education can be a catalyst for justice. My mother gave me a different, less secular inheritance. Deeply religious and formed by the ancient traditions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, she asked something more intimate of me. She wanted me to embody the cardinal virtues and develop character more than anything else.

I spent a while trying to reconcile these two seemingly different obligations, one directing me toward the forces that govern collective life and the other toward the cultivation of the mind and a relationship with God. Eventually, I came to see they were two sides of the same coin because both are attempting to answer the same enduring question of how and why humans are capable of both suffering and flourishing, exuding light and darkness. These influences compelled me to examine society without losing sight of the individual, because I believed insight into collective life begins with an understanding of human consciousness.

I studied neuroscience and psychology in college in pursuit of answers to these questions. In graduate school, I turned toward philosophy and health policy because I imagined a medical career where I could heal individual minds while keeping the broader social forces of human suffering in view. Groups are made up of individuals, after all. Yet, my movement toward a medical career was faster than my understanding of what medicine could and could not do. I assumed the tools of science and clinical care would give me an unusually direct way to impact as many lives as possible. But thousands of hours in hospitals working in clinical research and care delivery gradually complicated that faith. I began to see structural limits in medicine and how often psychological suffering was poorly understood or left outside the boundaries of care, if properly recognized at all. The distance between medicine’s scientific sophistication and its understanding of mental suffering became too large to ignore. The scientism I had absorbed in academia did not survive prolonged contact with the healthcare system.

Then COVID arrived and gave me an unwelcome experiment in introspection. The external world became quiet, isolation set in, and the structures that had kept me moving suddenly fell away. Although I had lived in the United States for almost a decade by then, I felt new and foreign to the community around me. More unsettlingly, I looked inward and felt like a foreigner in my own mind. The loss of a close family member further complicated the situation and introduced me to a level of grief I had never experienced before, on top of a personal health crisis that made me contemplate my own mortality for the first time. Then came heartbreak. A relationship I had imagined would become a life together ended and I found myself in a depth of despair for which productivity offered very little help. I had spent years studying human suffering, but I had not learned how to suffer well myself. This was the beginning of what I now call my spiritual homelessness.

Suffering is already written into the equation of life. The question is how you solve for it. I understood this intellectually, but my first instinct was to drown my suffering through familiar ways of engaging with the collective. Meditation practices I encountered during the pandemic gave me some distance from my thoughts, but I was still tempted to turn that distance into productivity. There was always something to fix around me. There was scientism in medicine, social injustice throughout the world, and countless health problems affecting millions of people. Each seemed to demand attention and offered a respectable promise of escape. One can spend an astonishing amount of time trying to fix the world in order to avoid confronting oneself. 

It was shortly after this period of crisis that a sequence of synchronicities brought Dr. Eva Natanya into my life, and with her the contemplative life entered my horizon. As a scholar of comparative religion and an extraordinarily generous teacher, Dr. Natanya gave me language for a possibility I had sensed but could not articulate: my Christian background did not have to place me in opposition to the contemplative traditions of the world. Our conversations allowed me to explore Christian contemplative traditions such as the Carmelites of the Catholic tradition alongside Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism. These traditions had developed in different historical settings, yet were asking remarkably similar questions about the nature of the mind. I began to recognize that contemplative traditions across cultures had preserved forms of inquiry into the human condition that modern intellectual life has abandoned in favor of physicalism and positivism. My interaction with Dr. Natanya returned me to questions I had encountered before, such as what it means to live well and what it means to resist suffering, while opening doors to harder ones, such as what freedom may become possible for human beings when we pursue truth instead of specific mental states. The writings of St. John of the Cross and his idea of the dark night of the soul, for instance, began to speak differently to me when I confronted them alongside the Dzogchen tradition in Buddhism. I realized that the spirituality I sought did not require a new belief system. Rather, it required something more demanding: the cultivation of a contemplative life.

Dr. Natanya also changed the place of ethics in my understanding of human flourishing in a way that allowed my parents’ language of virtue and responsibility to converge. I had confronted questions of virtue in Western philosophy through thinkers such as G. E. M. Anscombe, Simone Weil, and Plato, but only now was I seriously asking what ethical framework was required to give substance to my ambition of easing mental suffering in others. Through her encouragement, I was exposed to retreats taught by Dr. Alan Wallace, which introduced me to Tibetan Buddhist contemplative practices and gave me the ability to drink straight from the firehose of Dharma. Through the retreats, I learned life-changing skills for observing the mind directly rather than just theorizing about it. I also encountered a richer account of happiness in the idea of eudaimonic flourishing—what Dr. Wallace calls genuine happiness. His focus on the looming metacrisis helped me place my own experience within a larger historical frame and gave me a way to understand why this moment feels different from other tumultuous times in the past, such as the one experienced by my parents. Our modern world combines incredible potential for prosperity and human flourishing with an equally incredible risk due to the fact that those in the driver’s seats remain driven by the fears, attachments, and unrecognized motives of the mind. Therefore, I saw clearly that changing systems and structures is not enough to build a more humane society so long as we ignore the inner worlds that motivate us. Dr. Wallace’s wisdom also clarified my frustration with medicine and why despite its remarkable scientific precision, the field often fails to comprehend suffering that cannot be labeled as disease.

I am currently in a period of long-term contemplative practice and service at Miyo Samtem Ling hermitage in Crestone, and am slowly learning what it means to tame the mind and understand its true nature. I am grateful for the unlikely sequence of synchronicities that brought me here. What comes afterward will be another question. But I know that I want to carry forward greater spiritual depth for myself, greater dignity for the patients I want to help, and a robust ethical framework for the work of healing minds. My spiritual path has therefore become neither an escape from the world nor an alternative to action.

Today, we’d like to share more about the logistical aspects of retreat at the CCR: our hermitage grounds and accommodations, application process, and our mechanisms for providing financial support for retreatants.

The Hermitage

Miyo Samten Ling (MSL) is a sprawling complex of buildings on 110 acres of land, in a transitional zone between brushland and juniper/piñon forest on gently rolling hills next to the expansive Baca Wildlife Preserve in southern Colorado. Our fourteen actively occupied retreat cabins are located in carefully spaced arrangements in multiple areas of this land. Retreat cabins are nestled among small hills such that they are not visible to each other, but are within easy walking distance. This affords a balance of isolation and proximity—retreatants are palpably both in solitude and among spiritual community.

The retreat center complex includes:

• 14 retreat dwellings
• Manjushri Chapel (~75-person capacity)
• Maitri House community building (library, gathering area, kitchen, laundry, offices, guest rooms)
• Caretaker complex (caretaker dwelling, maintenance and repair facilities)
• Tidro Cave short-term guest retreat dwelling (under development, projected to be completed and available for reservation in Fall 2026)
• Walking trails through undeveloped land

The standard retreat dwellings are sustainably built frames with stucco exterior, and include a bedroom, kitchen area, study/practice area, and bathroom. In the winter, they are heated by both small woodstoves and the remarkably powerful passive solar influence of the desert sun at high altitude. Retreatants settle into these dwellings for weeks, months, or years, depending on their experience and intentions as carefully decided in collaboration with their spiritual teachers and guides.

Applying for Retreat

Practitioners who are interested in long-term retreat at Miyo Samten Ling begin by completing a detailed application, viewable here. This application asks prospective retreatants to reflect deeply on their current meditation practice, their history of study and practice, and their retreat intentions; to share about their meditation teachers; and to include important practical details about their overall mental and physical preparedness to live in solitude in a remote environment. If an applicant is considered to be a promising candidate for retreat, and if cabin openings are anticipated within the applicant’s requested timeframe to begin retreat, an interview process commences. A prospective retreatant will usually have an interview via video call with one of our resident teachers, and sometimes another interview with a CCR staff member, which allows time for extensive conversations to help us understand a practitioner’s contemplative journey, readiness, intentions, concerns, questions, and beyond. We also request reference letters from others familiar with the applicant’s spiritual history.

Entering into extended retreat is a decision that must be made and prepared for very carefully, and over the years since our founding, we have learned much about how to best understand whether a person has the contemplative background, mental and social stability, logistical preparedness, life experience, and physical health to be equipped for extended full-time practice at MSL. Applicants are accepted from a variety of backgrounds: CCR retreatants reflect a wide range of ages, educational and professional backgrounds, geographic and ethnic heritages, and spiritual lineages. 

The waiting list for retreat at the CCR is managed dynamically: some prospective retreatants are planning years in advance for open-ended retreat as they navigate necessary practical decisions and preparations to move to the CCR long-term, while others are ready to come for 2- to 3-month retreats at shorter notice. Still others have completed and continue to return for repeated retreats of 6 months or more, creating an arc of deepening retreat practice over the course of years. These cadences, together with immediate preparation for retreat through sustained practice while still at home, are designed on a case-by-case basis in close collaboration with CCR resident teachers and in accordance with the fluctuations in cabin space available at MSL.  

Retreat Costs and Retreatant Support

As described above, the CCR’s first priority is to identify retreatants who are qualified for long-term retreat and who have a heartfelt, deeply rooted aspiration to enter into retreat at MSL. Then, it is our priority to make it possible for them to do so, whether for months or years. Our Retreatant Support Fund is one way we do this.

If retreatants are financially able to donate to the CCR in support of their retreat, the suggested monthly charitable contribution range is currently $900–1200. These contributions enter a general fund that helps cover a proportion of the operational expenses incurred by the CCR in managing the needs of the hermitage; the rest of our operational expenses are covered by donations from our generous individual and institutional supporters. As a nonprofit, the CCR seeks adequate funding for the retreat program: to ensure that the retreat environment is safe and comfortable, that retreatants’ needs are met, and that the necessary outer conditions for dedicated practice are maintained. Retreat stewards shop for and deliver groceries to boxes outside retreatants’ cabins on a weekly basis, enabling retreatants to continue in the flow of retreat without ever leaving the hermitage property to purchase food and supplies.

Hermitage-related costs include:

• Utilities (electricity, propane, water/sewer, dumpster, internet/telephone)
• Hermitage supplies (e.g. toilet paper, cleaning supplies, fire & safety supplies, cooking implements, tools, etc.)
• Auto expenses
• Insurance
• Repairs & maintenance (repairs to retreat dwellings, fixing or replacing appliances, etc.)
• Property association fees, taxes
• Staff compensation
• Legal (including visa-related support) and accounting services 

The CCR’s Retreatant Support Fund was created to make retreat possible for people of varied financial means, understanding that while a prospective retreatant may be qualified for long-term retreat, that individual may not have the financial capacity to offer the suggested monthly donation in support of retreat. 

In these cases, they offer what they reasonably and responsibly can in charitable support of the retreat program, and the CCR contributes the remainder of funding in support of their retreat. To date, the CCR has provided over $160,000 of retreat funding for current and former retreatants, in reliance upon the Retreatant Support Fund. We are so grateful to our donors for making this rare opportunity for financially supported retreat possible, since it is very difficult to find such circumstances, especially outside of Asia.

Guidance During Retreat

When retreatants arrive for retreat, they are given a “bimonthly reporting date” on which to submit a detailed written report to the spiritual director, Dr. B. Alan Wallace, responding to eight specific questions about the quality and continuity of retreat practice, experiences and challenges, and about how they are maintaining physical, mental, and spiritual balance from day to day, week to week. Dr. Wallace usually responds within a day, offering practice suggestions, encouragement, and sometimes directing practitioners to specific passages in books or to a particular recorded teaching in order to help clarify their understanding of a particular element of practice.

Retreatants are invited to reach out to the spiritual director or one of the resident teachers at any time when a specific question or difficulty arises in practice, and when written correspondence is not the right medium with which to address an issue, retreatants meet individually with one of the resident spiritual guides at the hermitage. Guidance is highly personalized to the specific needs of individual retreatants during different periods in their retreats and spiritual growth. At times more one-on-one conversation is appropriate as a form of spiritual guidance and at other times more thoroughly sustained silence is the pathway for deepest maturation.

Our three resident instructors take turns in offering regular teachings to the hermitage and to our wider community online at monthly gatherings. Teachings and guidance are always free of charge, and our three resident spiritual guides do not receive salaries at the CCR. Several licensed psychologists are available for pro bono clinical counseling at any time if the need should arise for an individual retreatant.

We’ll share more on the topic of retreat guidance soon, including how we have evolved in our approach to leading retreatants into more and more continuous meditation practice in a sustainable way.

If you are interested in a retreat at MSL, you can explore the retreat page here, or reach out to us with questions at info@centerforcontemplativeresearch.org.